You are free to patch Perl to fix this.

However the problem is that the code which builds the string and finds the uninitialized variable has just been passed pointers to the variables, and not the names. Therefore it really doesn't know the name. Obviously the names of the potential variables are known at compile time, but they are not passed around in the compiled code. (Doing so would make data structures larger and slower.)

If you really wanted to get ambitious you could create a WARN handler that catches the warning and tries to figure out the variable in question. It could look at the warning, attempt to peek at the Perl source (I don't know where that is stored internally, but I'm sure it is in memory somewhere), and use PadWalker to go poking around and try to figure out the variable that caused the error. However to date nobody has gotten irritated and ambitious enough to tackle that project.

(If you did do that, then I'd suggest that you sign up for a CPAN account and put it on CPAN. There are people who would find that very useful...)

In reply to Re: Use of uninitialized value in ... by tilly
in thread Use of uninitialized value in ... by pascaldee

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